In the sport of kayaking, there are five pieces of essential gear: a boat, a paddle, a helmet, and a personal flotation device (PFD), and a spray skirt. The spray skirt is a garment worn around the waist of the paddler that stretches around the cockpit rim of the kayak, thereby keeping water out of the boat while in use. The spray skirt also allows for easy access and egress from the craft when necessary. There are a number of popular designs for spray skirts available today, but all of those designs relate to spray skirts that consist essentially of various flexible fabrics, like neoprene or waterproof nylon. These soft materials, while comfortable and easy to manufacture to fit a wide variety of cockpit sizes, also have several inherent problems that are particularly evident during high-performance whitewater paddling.
Conventional spray skirts have two main parts: a tunnel, which is meant to fit tightly around the torso of the paddler, and a deck, which is meant to keep water out of the boat by stretching over and fitting tight around the opening of the cockpit of the boat. Skirts of the prior art are almost all made with two types of fabric. Those fabrics are either a waterproof fabric such as urethane coated nylon, or neoprene. Urethane coated nylon, for example, has little to no stretch capacity and therefore is unable to provide the strong seal necessary for whitewater applications. Neoprene, on the other hand, is both waterproof and very stretchable, and thereby fits a wider variety of boats and torsos in one size. But a drawback to neoprene is that it is expensive. Neoprene also makes the kayak susceptible to implosion and it compromises the buoyancy of the kayak as will be discussed below. Further, neoprene is heavy.
Conventionally, the deck is kept in place on the cockpit by fitting underneath a cockpit rim, which is a curved lip around the top of the entire cockpit. A cockpit rim is necessary for a typical spray skirt to work, and is a standard feature on all kayak cockpits. There are three common ways to keep the deck snug underneath the cockpit rim. On the more basic non-stretchable skirts, a snug fit with the cockpit rim is accomplished with a draw cord. On the higher end neoprene skirts, and tight fit is accomplished by either a bungee cord sewn on the perimeter or outer edge of deck of the skirt, or an elastic material band secured to the perimeter or outer edge deck of the skirt.
While soft deck skirts are easy to manufacture and fit a wide variety of boats, soft deck skirts have design drawbacks. Those drawbacks are as follows: spray skirt “implosions” due to excessive water pressure, the susceptibility of the soft skirt to distort due to water pressure and thereby adversely affecting the performance of the kayak in high end whitewater maneuvers, and the inability of soft deck skirts to house, hold or protect technical equipment often used in extended kayak touring trips.
Each problem will be briefly discussed. Spray skirt implosions most often occur when a large volume of water breaks on top of the kayak and pushes the skirt down between the paddler's knees. This challenges the seal of the skirt under the cockpit rim to the point of failure, and in the worst case, the skirt releases and the boat fills with water.
Performance is also compromised by soft decked skirts. Cork-like recoil is a necessary feature for high-performance whitewater kayaking. For example, tricks involving plunging or submerging the kayak below the surface of the water such that the kayak shoots above the surface with sufficient strength require this cork-like recoil. Often times these tricks involve the paddler pushing the boat into the water well past the cockpit area. Traditional soft deck skirts during these maneuvers oftentimes push deep with in the cockpit area of the boat creating drag and/or reduced buoyancy, thereby compromising the performance of the cork-like recoil necessary for the completion of these maneuvers.
Finally, soft-decked skirts cannot hold instrumentation. Touring kayakers have a need for visual access to a variety of instruments during open water paddling and currently the paddler would have to carry the instruments inside the boat or attached somewhere on their body requiring frequent stops to check the instruments. During heavy weather this would be very inconvenient. Soft deck skirts do not offer any solution to this problem. Not only do soft deck skirts fail to offer a stable, protective mounting place for the instruments, any instrumentation attached on to a soft deck skirt would weigh the skirt down making it more likely that water would pool on it and also more likely to implode.